Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Over-Soul, A Primer
We are all more connected than you think
Most adults have heard of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson was a well-known preacher, poet, essayist, philosopher and speaker. He lived in New England from 1802 to 1882, advocated for the abolition of slavery and remains one of the most influential writers of the nineteenth century. He is most remembered for his inspiring statements. In fact, a large number of today’s self-improvement books contain quotes from Emerson, such as:
The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.
Dare to live the life you have dreamed for yourself. Go forward and make your dreams come true.
Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising up every time we fail.
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Unfortunately, even though they sound like Emerson and are attributed to Emerson, Emerson didn’t write any of the above statements. [1] But he did write these:
God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.[2]
It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.[3]
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.[4]
Emerson covers the same themes as those made-up quotes. And it is for these kinds of sentiments that he is famous for. Even today, I was reading a paragraph in Brendon Burchard’s High Performance Habits, which is remarkably similar to Emersonian thinking.
The main motivation of humankind [is] to be free, to express our true selves and pursue our dreams without restriction—to experience what may be called personal freedom. Our spirits soar when we feel unencumbered by fear or the weight of conformity. When we live our truth—expressing who we really are, how we really feel, what we really desire and dream of—then we are authentic; we are free.[5]
Despite all his fame, the most important points that Emerson tried to make have mostly been forgotten by time. If you spoke of how all the experiences and thoughts of the dead still exist in some spiritual sphere and that we can all somehow tap this information. . .if you said this to average people on the street, they would think you absolutely looney. And if you were a writer, you would be discredited by critics as a goofball. But this is what Emerson wrote about quite a bit.
According to Emerson, every thought, every emotion, every experience ever entertained throughout history is accessible to us and influences us all. It is well-known that we can access the thought and experience of famous individuals in books, on the internet, and at lectures. But what about the contributions of the rest of humanity? A greater way to access all of this is through the Universal Mind. Emerson wrote:
There is one mind common to all individual men.
Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. . .
What Plato has thought, he may think;
what a saint has felt, he may feel;
what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand.
Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done,
for this is the only and sovereign agent.[6]
This bank of thoughts, emotions and experiences exists in some supernatural realm we cannot perceive with our senses and scientific instruments. Emerson, along with his fellow Transcendentalists, called it the Over-Soul. Through it, all humans, regardless of time or place, are linked to one another.
The Transcendentalists
The Transcendentalists were a group of radical Boston-area thinkers who were active from the mid-1830s up to the civil war. They were born into a world of New England conformity. (Remember, the Puritans had settled the Massachusetts area three hundred years earlier.) Religious doctrines and social morays were dictated by society, and all but outcasts and madmen obeyed. Exterior and interior worlds were formed by the prevailing conservative standards of the time and place. The Transcendentalist movement broke away, partially in reaction to that constricting societal straitjacket. The enhanced individuality that we Americans enjoy today comes in large part from that historical fissure.
To Transcendentalists, truth comes from within, not without. Their view is that dogma and traditions limit people from being what they can be. Dogma and traditions fashion people to be near identical in thought and aspirations. Dogma and tradition are the constraints of history upon our spirits.
If only individuals would attend to the Divine spark within, they could break free, or transcend, and live unique fulfilling lives that hopefully would benefit all of humanity. For example, Beethoven, followed his inner wisdom, breaking many of the traditions of formal composing and gave to Humanity his gift, his Fifth Symphony. (You know the one: Da da da dummm!). Rather than be constrained by the rules of how music should be, he followed his spirit and wrote compositions that we still enjoy hundreds of years later.
The Transcendentalists believed that the truth of religion does not come from tradition or historical facts but emanates from the soul. By cultivating self-reliance and intuition, we can tap into this collective consciousness, the Over-Soul, and gain spiritual insight and realize our unique potential. If we attend to our souls, we can experience religious truth, master our unique gifts and become one with God.
The God of the Transcendentalists is fundamentally Christian, but without the fire and brimstone dogma of earlier Puritan generations.[7] Still, they, like their Puritan forebearers, believed that they were trailblazing the way for humanity, demonstrating what religious life could be for those who might follow. The Transcendentalists dreamed of a new “City on a Hill.” Some of them even tried to establish a utopian community, Brook Farm, to be a shining light in the darkness for all the world to emulate. Many famous Transcendentalists were involved in the experiment. Nathaniel Hawthorne later wrote about it in a short novel. Unfortunately, it did not work out as planned.
You may remember Henry David Thoreau spent a much-publicized night in prison for refusing to pay a tax to fund President Polk’s war with Mexico. (He would have stayed longer but someone anonymously paid his taxes.) This was Thoreau bucking social pressures and living according to his own authentic beliefs. Other famous Transcendentalists include Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller and William Henry Channing. Many of them transitioned into abolitionists during the ante-bellum period.
Soul and the Over-Soul
Emerson wrote on the soul and its relationship to the Over-Soul:
The soul in man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs;
is not a function, like the power of memory, of calculation, of comparison,
but uses these as hands and feet;
is not a faculty, but a light;
is not the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellect and the will;
is the background of our being, in which they lie.[8]
According to Emerson, our souls are filled and animated by the Over-Soul, which is the collective soul of all people past and present. “Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence.”[9] The soul of every person, both living and dead, is unified in the Over-Soul.
When people act from their souls, their unique brand of Truth from their higher self becomes evident: “When it breathes through his intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it flows through his affection, it is love.”[10]
As Emerson explained, God is also connected to the Over-Soul, so that by connecting to the Over-Soul, we are indirectly connecting to God.
Within man is the soul of the whole;
the wise silence;
the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related,
the eternal One.[11]
Each one of us, then, is a unique manifestation of God.
Emerson sparked a huge scandal when he proclaimed in a 1938 commencement address at Harvard Divinity School that Jesus was not any more divine than we can be.
[Jesus Christ] saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. . .he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man. . .He saw that God incarnates himself in man. [Jesus] said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, `I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or, see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.[12]
Often after athletes perform an extraordinary feat, they will point to the sky, which I think gives the credit of their accomplishment on the field to God, not to themselves. This follows the Transcendentalist idea that our brilliance flows from God.
When I watch that flowing river, which, out of regions I see not, pours for a season its streams into me, I see that I am a pensioner; not a cause but a surprised spectator of this ethereal water[13]
Or in modern, less poetic, terms: our souls are receivers of God’s essence. When we are at our most effective, we are merely letting God’s energy flow through us.
These ideas about Over-Soul are infused into parts of our worldview, even though most of us just haven’t given it a name, like Emerson did.
The other day, I heard Lex Fridman say on a podcast:
Where do ideas come from?. . .Tell me one scientist or artist that can tell you where their good ideas come from. . .It’s never systematic. It’s always, like. . .you’re like channeling, you’re a receiver, an antenna or something. Where is that coming from?[14]
Could he be referring to the Over-Soul without knowing?
Complicated Lives Block Out the Over-Soul
Why don’t we always act from this higher source? The problem is that we are flawed creatures. Our emotional and mental preoccupations prevent us from receiving as much of the Divine inspiration of the Over-Soul as we could. Emerson wrote,
The influence of the senses has, in most men, overpowered the mind to that degree, that the walls of time and space have come to look real and insurmountable.[15]
We can all be Godlike, if we heeded our souls, but we don’t. Instead, we are numbed by constant stimulation. We pursue our selfish desires. We act to shelter our fragile egos. All of this overpowers the gentle whispers of our souls. We don’t hear them anymore, and we become alternatively stupid or brutish or we sleepwalk through life. We are certainly nowhere near the God-like potential that we could be. We create circumstances that require others to suffer so that we can achieve our ends. Ultimately, all suffering results from people not heeding the Divine guidance of their souls.
Since I was a child, I have viewed Divine inspiration (Emerson called it influx) as akin to a shower head. We stand under the shower and hope to be bathed in the clear water of the Divine. But as we age and our lives become complicated, the flow of Divine water through the shower head becomes impeded by minerals and grunge, that have lodged in the showerhead, so we receive little or none of the Divine flow. Our selfishness, our lies and our warped perspectives all serve as the metaphoric grunge preventing our reception of Divine inspiration. This is the common lot of humankind. Our psychological shortcomings stunt us spiritually. We have so much potential, and we unknowingly waste it because we haven’t figured out how to remove the muck or prevent it from building up in the first place.
What we commonly call man, the eating, drinking, planting, counting man, does not, as we know him, represent himself, but misrepresents himself. Him we do not respect, but the soul, whose organ he is, would he let it appear through his action, would make our knees bend.[16]
Indeed, all of us share the Over-Soul. When we meet others, rather than judge their physical, mental or emotional states, we should instead recognize them for what they are, unique manifestations of God, just like we are.
We are all fellow travelers in this life. We are all united, as we are all of one piece. We all share the same destiny, have the same past, are of the same substance. If only we could see each other this way. . .
[1] The problem is that Emerson wrote in the language of his time, which is not our language of today. These quotes falsely attributed to Emerson say essentially what he was conveying, but in our modern style. If you want to find them online, just type the quote into your browser and you will find them all over the place, especially in websites of famous quotations.
[2] Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essay on Self-Reliance, (The Roycrofters), 1908, 31.
[3] Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essay on Self-Reliance, 19.
[4] Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essay on Self-Reliance, 30.
[5] Brendon Burchard’s High Performance Habit, (Hay House Publishing, 2017), 274.
[6]Ralph Waldo Emerson, “History,” Emerson: Essays (Humphies, 1899), archive.org/details/emersonessays00emergoog/page/n12/mode/2up. Emerson wrote this in a prose essay, but it just seems clearer when arranged as a poem, so I put it in poetic form.
[7] In fact, Transcendentalism is an offshoot of the Unitarian Church, which itself evolved from the Puritan religion.
[8] Emerson, “The Over-Soul.”
[9] Emerson, “The Over-Soul.”
[10] Emerson, “The Over-Soul.”
[11] Emerson, “The Over-Soul.”
[12] Ralph Waldo Emerson, commencement address to Harvard Divinity School, 1838.
[13] Emerson, “The Over-Soul.”
[14] Lex Fridman, quoted in Joe Rogan Experience #1824, July 27, 2024,
[15] Emerson, “The Over-Soul.”
[16] Emerson, “The Over-soul.”